Censor to Codger: “Do you mean, sir, to satirize the whole company, that you thus repeatedly profess thinking among those who have no other aim than talking?” (Act IV)

Theatre Erindale made history by presenting the Canadian premiere of The Witlings, a play written in 1779 by Fanny Burney (1752-1840). A writer best known for her novel Evelina (1778), Burney is often seen as a precursor to Jane Austen. Actually to see The Witlings is a major privilege since the play was not performed until the 20th century. While in terms of plot The Witlings may not reach the perfection of plays like The Rivals (1775) or The School for Scandal (1777) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan or She Stoops to Conquer (1773) by Oliver Goldsmith, the Theatre Erindale production demonstrates clearly that Burney’s play has many positive features of its own, most notably a large cast of eccentric characters that look forward more to the novels of Charles Dickens than back to Restoration comedy. It is a play that has languished in obscurity for far too long and we can feel nothing but gratitude to Theatre Erindale for choosing to stage it.

The history of the play is the depressing story of male suppression of a female voice. Burney had been encourage to write The Witlings by Sheridan himself. Burney’s father and his good friend, however, did not want the play published or performed because they felt it was not proper for a woman to write comedy. Eventually, the manuscript was lost and not discovered until 1945. The play, along with Burney’s other dramatic works, was not published until 1995. The play received it world premiere on February 5, 1998, at the Main Street Theater in Houston, Texas.

The play is written in five acts but is performed in three in director Patrick Young’s adaptation with two intermissions. Burney spends all of her Act 1 and most of Act 2 introducing her characters and their relationship to one another. The first complication does not occur until part way through Act 2 and a plot to solve the problem resulting from the complication is not hatched until the very end of Burney’s Act 4 and not enacted until halfway through Act 5.

What absorbs our interest instead is the panoply of delightful characters Burney creates and the humorous ways in which they interact. Act 1 is set in a milliner’s shop run by Mrs. Wheedle (Hannah Vanden Boomen). He first customer is Mrs. Voluble (Kaitlyn Alexander), who lives up to her name by gossiping non-stop. Next enters Beaufort (Samuel Turner) with his friend Censor (Christian Tribuzio), who doesn’t like being dragged to a ladies’ shop so that Beaufort can meet his beloved Cecilia (Mercedes Morris). Soon enters a woman to match Mrs. Voluble in speech, Mrs. Sapient (Hannah Ehman), who has the amusing habit of believing herself full of remarkable opinions, though, as Censor says, “When she utters a truth self-evident as that the sun shines at noon day, she speaks it as a discovery resulting from her own peculiar penetration and sagacity”. Indeed, she soon states, “In my opinion, nothing can be really elegant that is tawdry”. Next in is Beaufort’s half-brother Jack (Jovan Kocic), who, like today’s multitasking teenagers, is always doing so many things at once and in such a hurry that he never gets anything done.

Burney completes her cast of eccentrics in her Act 2, where we meet Lady Smatter (Bailey Green), who is the head of a salon of would-be learned people called the Esprit Party, or “witlings” by those, like Censor, who see through them. Lady Smatter’s peculiar foible is her pride in her wide-ranging reading although she seems not to remember specifically anything she’s read. Like Mrs. Sapient, she is constantly expressing opinions, but unlike Sapient attributes them to whatever author happens to pop into her mind. The next arrival is Codger (Mark Snetzko), father of Jack and step-father to Beaufort, who is as slow as Jack is quick. It takes him so longer to consider things that he is usually several minutes behind everyone else and chides them for not allowing him to speak. Last of Burney’s would-be wits is Dabbler (Tomas Ketchum), a talentless poet lionized by Lady Smatter, Mrs. Voluble and Mrs. Sapient, and, in fact, romantically desired by the last two.

The crisis when it comes is that Cecilia’s banker has absconded with her entire fortune. In the eyes of Lady Sapient that immediately makes Cecilia an unsuitable match for her nephew Beaufort. Indeed, she says that if Beaufort pursues Cecilia she will disinherit him. We have to wait for Censor to arrive at a solution.

What links all these characters is their self-absorption. One reason why the action is prolonged is that Censor is unable to wrench Cecilia out of her notion that Beaufort has abandoned her. Censor is at fault too since his latent irritation gets the better of him and he gives up trying to convince her otherwise.

Burney’s particular satire is of people who speak before they think. Voluble, Sapient, Smatter, Jack and Dabbler all fall into this category. It is especially amusing when the group all praise each other’s wit out loud while dispraising them in private. The contrast is Codger, who has to think so much, he rarely gets to speak. What makes Burney’s play so unusual is that in de-emphasizing the plot and in choosing the characters she does, her play takes on the structure of variations upon a theme rather than outright farce, the same structure that makes Chekhov’s plays so distinctive.

This being a student production, the cast is quite variable, though what unites them is a clear sense of purpose and understanding of the play – qualities too often lacking in professional productions of classic plays. The principal standout is Christian Tribuzio as Censor. He has a strong stage presence and a clarity and sense of authority speaking his lines far beyond his years. His character’s tone changes from satire, to irony to sincerity, but Tribuzio distinguishes each and its implication for what his character is saying. He is in his fourth year and would be an asset to any classical theatre festival.

Several women also rise to the challenges of the wonderful roles Burney has written. Kaitlyn Alexander is so inside the role of Mrs. Voluble she plays it as if is were second nature. She makes Voluble’s perorations on trivial topics amusing enough but the energy she puts into chiding her taciturn son Bobby for talking too much is hilarious. Hannah Ehman is thoroughly delightful as Mrs. Sapient. Director Patrick Young stops the action whenever Sapient expresses one of her great “opinions” and Ehman takes full advantage of these to play up Sapient’s self-congratulatory expressions of the obvious.

Bailey Green certainly captures the hauteur of Lady Smatter but she could stand to give her more variety of expression. She makes Smatter’s ever so polite turning of her back on Cecilia quite chilling in its meanness. Tomas Ketchum is well-cast as Dabbler, making him appear both attractive and scatterbrained at once. He, too, could lend Dabbler more variety, but does have an excellent scene where the frustrated poet is forced to consult a rhyming dictionary to complete a verse.

Samuel Turner and Mercedes Morris have the difficult task of trying to make the traditional bland young lovers of 18th-century comedy interesting. They give us lots of earnestness but not much else. Since Burney does give them some unusual lines, greater clarity in delivering meaning would help make their characters more distinctive.

Young’s clever set design, Barbara Rowe’s elaborate period costumes and James W. Smagata’s lighting are of a fully professional level. As a director Young has a clear insight into the nature of the play and aims to convey it as straightforwardly as possible. His pacing is admirable and he handles Burney’s use of asides and parallel conversations with aplomb. One can’t really quarrel with his accompanying various characters’ soliloquies with music except that it makes it harder to focus on what the characters are saying. He only descends into camp twice, when he has Cecilia too self-consciously collapse into a chair overwhelm with her plight. This maybe to raise a laugh but Burney does not seem to have devised her young lovers for this purpose.

In the face of the largely unadventurous programming at Stratford and at the larger theatres in Toronto, it’s is good that the Department of English and Drama of the University of Toronto, Mississauga, should explore the repertory others have left unexamined. Over the years Theatre Erindale has presented The Revenger’s Tragedy (1995/96), The Man of Mode (2001/02), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (2002/03), Women Beware Women (2004/05), A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Maid’s Tragedy (2006/07), The Taming of the Tamer (2008/09) and The Clandestine Marriage (2009/10) among others – all plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries or from the Restoration and 18th century that Stratford ought to have presented by now but never has.

Theatre Erindale has given a major rarity such as The Witlings such a sympathetic production, one looks forward to what other rarities it has in store. In fact, next up is The Rover (1677) by Aphra Behn (1640-89) running March 13-23.